Life Is a Highway
original song written, composed, and recorded by Tom Cochrane
"Life Is a Highway" is a song by Canadian musician Tom Cochrane from his second studio album, Mad Mad World (1991). Released in September 1991, by Capitol Records, the single became a number-one hit in Canada in late 1991. "Life Is a Highway" also peaked at number six on both the US Billboard Hot 100 and Cash Box Top 100 in August 1992 and reached the top two in Australia and New Zealand the same year. The accompanying music video was directed by David Storey. The song was covered by Chris LeDoux for his 1998 album One Road Man and Rascal Flatts in 2006 for the Cars soundtrack.
In 2016 a 322-kilometre (200 mi) section of Manitoba Provincial Road 391 was designated "Tom Cochrane's Life Is a Highway" in honour of the singer, born near that highway, and the song.
Background and release
Cochrane has stated that "Life Is a Highway" was originally conceived in the 1970s as "Love Is a Highway" while he was still a member of Red Rider, but was shelved at that time because he felt the unfinished song was unusable. Following a trip with his family to eastern Africa with the World Vision famine relief organization, Cochrane revisited the song on the advice of his friend John Webster, an instrumentalist on the Mad Mad World album. In a 2017 interview with The Canadian Press to mark the song's 25th anniversary, Cochrane said Webster encouraged him to revisit the demonstration (demo) recording, which at that point only had mumbled vocals and improvised lyrics, but not the song's well-known chorus. "(The song) became a pep talk to myself...
The public source identifies “Life Is a Highway” as original song written, composed, and recorded by Tom Cochrane. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Life, Highway and original.
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Reception evidence should be dated and situated: later canonical status may differ sharply from the work’s initial circulation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 1, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6544906. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1991, 1992, 1998 and 2006.
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This entry incorporates text from “Life Is a Highway” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.